


Perihelion, or, the Great Comet of 1882

by viviandarkbloom



Category: Last Tango In Halifax
Genre: Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Western, F/F, I REGRET NOTHING, Why Did I Write This?, complete fucking crack, don't say anything, shut up
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-17 22:48:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15471813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viviandarkbloom/pseuds/viviandarkbloom
Summary: San Francisco. Whores and guns. Enjoy.





	Perihelion, or, the Great Comet of 1882

**Author's Note:**

> There comes a time in every writer's life where they succumb to terrible and/or weird ideas. This is, perhaps, one of those times. At any rate it is just something to entertain myself because like most idiotic Americans I love me a good western! Perhaps if I had written that AU Xena uber western musical I had thought of many years ago (Apocalypso!) I could have spared you this madness. 
> 
> Note: The phrase "polymath love's androgynous advocate" is stolen/borrowed from William Faulkner. One must make use of one's useless English degree.

_San Francisco, 1882_

_your shape in the form of the sea_

Spread across a mahogany desk, the newspaper is dissected, absorbed, and devoured voraciously—this rag running necklaces of dirty type that smudge fingertips, this dirty herald the only touchstone with the world outside a Barbary whorehouse. Today the paper tantalizes with a headline on a comet streaking through the southern hemisphere; one slice of an onion-thin page and there it is, an artist’s sad rendering that accompanies the story of the Great September Comet of 1882, first seen in Cordoba, Argentina.

Over wire-rimmed glasses, Caroline Eliot peers down at the drawing, takes in the words, breathes in an imagined Argentinian starry sky.

By November 20—the paper informs her—the nucleus had all but disappeared but the long tail retained a bright viscosity that whisked through the wintry sky near Princeton, New Jersey, its breathless magnitude an estimated 140,000,000 miles long and still visible to the naked eye. That said, the storywriter concludes spitefully, “It is very doubtful whether people generally would know anything about the occurrence until they read of it in the papers.”

If she were so inclined, she would track down the writer—a Dr. P.T. Mittenfelder—and slit his miserable throat just for that attitudinal prose alone. Fortunately it is in her practical nature to reserve homicidal urges for matters of a more pressing nature—most recently, a Pinkerton man asking for too large a bribe and thus, a razor, a cut, a Persian rug his ruinous grave.

We are but the humble slaves who prepared Cleopatra as an offering to Julius Caesar, she had said to Olga while they did the deed of rolling up the unfortunate Pinkerton in a Kashan rug, the blood medallions seeping from this nosy prick indistinguishable in a vermillion warp and weave.

You and your fucking fancy talk, Olga replied.

Caroline misses the rug, a gift from an ardent admirer back east. She rises, swipes a thumb across inky fingertips, and crowns the drawing of the great comet with her discarded glasses, which distort the thick spray of stars in a farsighted lens. At the window she looks into the winter evening. The night suits Pacific Street. All that is visible are shadows from the dim light of other buildings, other rooms, gaslights along the street, and beyond that, the eternal vault of the sea that ransoms dreams. For long hours the dreary, muddy, rainy winter stays encapsulated in darkness; winters are different here than they are back home. Even after everything that has happened, she still thinks about home, going home, being a schoolteacher once again. But there is no undoing the past, what she crossed another sea and a different country to forget: love and infamy and wealth gained and lost, from London to New York and Boston, to here—the precarious edge of the world. Where this strange sea captures voices unknown to Mr. Bell’s new invention, where the abstraction of the waves always fit, painful and unerring, in the form of the past.

You can either become an actress or a whore, John had said in London, when disaster struck and they were looking at debtors’ prison. Then a damning line: I’d say the latter, as your acting in the bedroom has always proved a mastery of performance.

First, she attempted the former. On stage in London she was pelted with rotting root vegetables—Shakespeare, even the comedies, a bad choice for a novice—so whoredom it was. London went well, save for the ambassador’s wife; New York was fine, except for the police commissioner’s wife. The dictates of sexual logic suggested that the Puritan-descendent Boston Brahmin would prove insatiable when confronted with a woman whose parlor games involved whips, bondage, Swinburne quoted at length, and loving recollections of female lovers past and present, and all while getting ridden gloriously like a horse into battle. Money brought freedom, of a kind: she could open an establishment of her own, anywhere she liked. _Vita nuova._ The only problem with this new life was that the soiled knickers of the previous life, in the form of her husband, followed.

Her husband: the gentleman gambler, the natty novelist, the fucking fool. She did her part and gave him sons; no matter that either one of them could not tolerate their father. In turn he wrote bad books, drank away their money, and when she was caught in flagrante with the Parisian wife of the German ambassador, turned it into a _succes de scandale_ that gave them enough money to get the hell out of London before she was arrested.

Somehow, these random thoughts have summoned him: She hears his usual demanding rap upon the door, followed by the shoulder-hunched uxoriousness of his entrance, as if in the time between the knock and the opening of the door he thinks better of acting like a complete prick. His dandyish attire clashes with his gin-soaked countenance, yet people find him charming; it’s a conundrum that makes Caroline take that extra little pinch of opium every day. Regardless, he serves well as the general manager and majordomo of the establishment.

She doesn’t turn from the window. “What is it?”

“There is some— _gunslinger_ downstairs, who refuses to leave.”

Decorously Caroline touches the fine satin of the curtain, as marvelous as what lies between a woman’s legs. “I’ve not heard shots.”

“Yes, and one doesn’t _hear_ the hangman’s noose slipping around one’s neck until a crack and a snap and a stench of shit and piss fills one’s nostrils like a deluge of death raining on your door, and then it’s all too late—no, believe me when I report on what I’ve seen with my own eyes.”

He points dramatically at dark eyes threaded with fine lines of bloodshot, an embroidery of failure and gin. Despite everything, she remains an admirer of John’s vivid turn of phrase. Pity his books did not sell and that the fevered dream of glorious riches reaped from throngs of American admirers never came to pass. “I trust you’ve made overtures to the fellow?” she inquires. “Suggest that he leave the premises?”

“Suggestions, overt, subtle, and all gradations in between, have been felicitously extended.”

“If he causes no trouble, why not leave him be? Is there something about him that gives you pause? Don’t like the cut of his jib? The color of his cravat? The bulge in his trousers?”

John sighs. “He’s in the judge’s chair.”

Caroline turns around. “Well. That is a problem.” Judge Taversham availed himself of the whorehouse every fortnight, Tuesdays, to be precise. His slavish devotion to ritual and generous pockets were welcomed and appreciated in so chaotic a world. He arrives precisely at 7 p.m., sits for an hour in a vast leather chair situated near the fireplace and drinks Plymouth gin with Olga, who chats him up until 7:55, at which point he relocates his bulk to the poker table where, at 9, he ascends to Olga’s rooms, finishes by 9:35, sleeps for an hour, leaves by 11, arrives home by 11:30 just in the nick of time to staunch the blood fury of his wife’s protests, and Bob’s your uncle.

“Indeed.” John helps himself to the bourbon decanter. “Perhaps you can utilize your vast, inimitable charms to persuade the gent to leave. The judge will be present in half an hour, if not sooner.”

“Sometimes there is not enough opium in the fucking world in compensation for the shit that the very same world hands me every bloody day.” She sags against the desk. “The great goddamned giveth and taketh of it all.”

“God, Caroline, if only you’d uttered your lines on stage with the same passion as you do when mildly inconvenienced in the realm of the mundane, I daresay we would have made a fortune in London.” At this point in their relations he is more than accustomed to her ferocious looks, and senses quite accurately that an object will be hurled at his head—indeed, Caroline now picks up and lovingly cradles in her hand a beautiful, flowered Baccarat paperweight gifted her by Mr. Oscar Wilde, an admirer, _o my blessed female sodomite_ he so addressed her in an intimate letter—but despite this risks the archness of his tone: “I see that a trip to Mr. Wu’s den of bliss is sorely needed.”

“Yes.” Like the sea, opium consecrates the past in a dreamlike sheen, in memories blurred and comforting, the real and the imaginary indistinguishable in a fragmentary nocturne. For a moment she closes her eyes, imagines the bottom of the sea. Then, with a sigh, rouses herself. “No matter. Let’s have a look at your gunslinger.”

From the balcony overlooking the Paradise, all is keenly observed—excluding the instances when she is under the influence of Mr. Wu’s splendid opiates: The bar, the piano, the gaming tables, and the roaring fireplace, cupped by a half-moon of leather chairs. The largest and blackest, serving as a throne, is dead center to the fireplace. It is where the judge always sits, his large frame happily snug within sleek contours. Currently it holds another occupant, a young man, no—what looks to be a short, slender teenaged boy who is almost dwarfed by the chair, and from Caroline’s bird’s-eye view the most notable features about the lad are a broad brown hat and the glint of two pistols on either hip. He sits alone and unperturbed, a tumbler of whiskey by his side, amid the happy cacophony of voices and laughter and sloppy piano playing that rises to the balcony.

“Jesus Christ, John.” She turns, glares at him. “He’s a boy.”

“This is perhaps the first time in my life when I’ve need to utter this—but in matters of firearms, size truly does not matter.”

“You made me think Wyatt Fucking Earp was in our midst.”

“Look at the revolvers. They’re top notch. Pearl handles. What greenhorn, what wet-eared cowpoke handles steel like that?”

“Probably stole them.”

“Look—he won’t listen to me, won’t even spare me a glance. We’ve no time to waste. Just get rid of him, Caroline,” John hisses.

With a deep breath she descends the staircase; typically this is the highlight of her day, when all eyes, for a moment, are on the beautiful madam and owner of the Paradise. Olga, leaning against the bar, eyes her steadily. It’s flattering to receive her attention, but after Kate—here she hesitates, grips the railing with a shaking hand, thinks that she really should have partaken in a certain amount of poppy-derived bliss before even entertaining the idea of throwing out some chuckleheaded youth—well, she thinks, Olga has a derringer, the barkeep has a shotgun, John screams like a baby denied a tit, I’ll be fine.

Courtesy of a steady drip from the young man’s boots, a puddle reflecting the fluttering caprices of the fire waxes and wanes on the floor. She feels heat rising off him, imagines a hard ride in the cold rain atop a horse, steam emanating from a tired, water-soaked body. It gives her pause. There is always something touching about the weariness of the traveler, the stranger that seeks shelter. It all goes back, she supposes, to Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the bloody manger. This boy is no Jesus, but she feels a twinge of sympathy just glancing at his clothes: The dark waistcoat is boxy, too big for his modest frame, and the dingy embroidered vest underneath has seen better days. The beautiful revolvers lay nestled in their holders and resting against moleskin-clad thighs. The broad brown hat, glistening with absorbed rain, is pulled so low that there is no face to this silent, alleged miscreant, to whom she must make sweet.

Her charms are not always so quickly deployed; true seduction takes time. Caroline sits on the arm of the broad chair, sidesaddle-like, hoping that the gentle press of her thigh against his forearm provides enticement enough. Sometimes the mere proximity of a female body part is enough to send a boy into such spasms that he unloads before his trousers are even off. And that, she finds, is the best of paydays.  

She stares at the hat brim, at the smooth jaw clenched and shadowed underneath it. “You look very comfortable there, lad,” she drawls.

No response.

“You’d be more at home in a brass bed, I assure you.”

A raised tumbler briefly disappears under the brim.

“You can have your pick of girls—well, not Olga, she’s for the judge. But all my girls are just as beautiful as she.”

Silence.

“No?”

The contents of the tumbler swirl with the nervy energy of a cat’s tail.

“Perhaps you like your own kind? A bit of buggery is what you fancy? I’ve no men about willing to bugger—so far as I know, if you’ll forgive me saying so, men are a bloody mystery sometimes. But I will tell you, that with the aid of certain erotic implements I am more than capable of holding my own in competition with the stiffest cock. I buggered my way through Boston’s Back Bay, so despite my self-designated status as retired, I’d give you a go. Hard as you like. Combine that with a woman’s touch, you can’t go wrong. I am the apotheosis of the sexes, polymath love’s androgynous advocate.”

Sometimes bullshit works, sometimes it does not.

The lack of today’s supplement of raw opium has rendered her impatient and edgy. She has no time to tarry with a boy. She sighs. “Look, lad, that’s my best and final offer.” More silence. She glances back at Olga, leaning against the bar with John. She gets the nod. “I’ve business to attend to here, this evening, in this very chair, and frankly you smell of sweat and horseshit, so you best fucking move off before I have to move you myself.”

The boy sits the glass on the stand to the right of the chair and that’s when Caroline finally takes note of his hands. Rather—her hands. Delicate, strong, unmistakably female—and quickly in possession of a revolver, the shiny tip of which now digs with deep unpleasantness into Caroline’s neck. She receives verification of the stranger’s gender as the gunslinger mutters, “Mind your manners, whore.”

No real surprise, that. In fact, it made a strange, bent kind of sense, a San Francisco type of logic. The real surprise is the inflection of the voice, the accent: English, from the North. From home.

A hushed silence follows the gasps and yawps and scraping of chairs, then John’s voice, the unshakable baritone he employs when declaiming bad poetry: “Steady now. We want no trouble.”

Her pulse beats and flows against the muzzle of the revolver, a tide rolling in and a tide rolling out—not, as the song goes, twice every day and eternally, indeed, it would flow no more if this cunt proves trigger-happy. The thought, however, of eternity away from this place, these people—a permanent opium dream—is so wonderful that she starts to laugh, and dizzily so, for the muzzle of the revolver presses too hard into the carotid artery and in her mind she swoons on a precarious toehold above a blue and black sea.

_Is that your form, in the shape of the wave—? Always turning and returning to me._

“Wondrous times we live in, don’t you think?” Caroline says. “Comets streaking across the sky, gold pouring out of the earth, and me, about to die whilst enduring a lecture on etiquette from some West Yorkshire cunt. Where are you from, love? Shat out of some hole like Halifax? Sowerby Bridge? Ripon?” With unabashed suicidal delight, she trills the _r_ in Ripon. “Do tell.”

“None of your fucking business,” the woman says.

“Afraid I’m unacquainted with that particular region. Must be in North Yorkshire.”

An irritated exhalation comes out as _feh,_ then a request that makes Caroline think the bitch has eyes in the back of her head that can see through a bloody hat: “Tell your pretty friend over there to put down the derringer.”

Always nervous at the flash of pistols, John is well ahead of her. “Olga,” he growls. “Put it down.”

Olga sighs, but does as she’s told. “Fuck sakes. Never have any fun around here.”

“Now what, princess of the dales?” Caroline says.

In response, the muzzle of the revolver grinds painfully into her neck.

A longing for death passes, if only because she’s currently intrigued how this will play out. “All right. You’ve made your point, so to speak.”

“Going to sit here and finish my drink,” the woman grunts. “In peace. Then I’ll leave. All right? Won’t be but two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“Make it one shake and you’ve got a deal.”

The gunslinger makes a soft, amused noise, somewhere between an aborted laugh and a smothered sigh. The pressure point of the muzzle lessens ever so slightly but remains, almost playfully grazing Caroline’s skin as she reaches for the tumbler with her right hand. She knocks back the final sliver of bourbon, lets the glass hover near her mouth a moment, and Caroline hears her breathe in the sweet scent of the liquor.

The loud echo of the tumbler slammed against the table makes her flinch imperceptibly and John spit out a nervous “shit.”

The woman stands. With breathtaking ease and grace, the gun pinwheels beautifully in her hand before it is holstered. And finally Caroline sees her face: plain, ascetically handsome, blue eyes burning as if she’s coming out of a fevered dream. Caroline is no romantic, but she imagines the perihelion—the blazing comet at its closest point to the sun, so dazzlingly close to immolation—to be this elusive shade of blue, cool and hot at once.

In mocking farewell, the woman touches fingers to the wide brim of the hat. Then she’s out the door, disappearing into the cold evening.

The Paradise lifts up its skirts and tiptoes back to life: the clinking of coins, the slapping of cards on the table, the tinkling of the piano, and the general murmured consensus of, _who the fuck was that_? as conversations ramp up with pure speculation.

At the bar John already has the good scotch out and pours a river into the largest tumbler they have. “Good Christ!” he moans, and swipes at his sweaty brow with a monogrammed handkerchief.

Caroline intercepts the drink and downs it efficiently, sneers at his outrage: “Look, I was the one with the fucking gun in my neck, all right?”

He pours another. “So. Wrong about the gender, right about the content of character: Nasty, brutish, and short.”

She hums, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

“Not really your type, though. Although over the years you have had hands in an astonishing variety of purses beyond moneyed ones and thus no amount of sensible conjecture could successfully predict where your fancy will lead next.”

“John.”

“Yes?”

Caroline stares at the door as if a trace of the woman somehow lingers—and quietly furious at her own fascination. “Shut the fuck up.”


End file.
